Recently passed federal environmental regulations require electrical and industrial utilities to evaluate and address final environmental closure for coal ash storage areas. In many cases, the plans for closing these storage facilities are complicated by aggressive deadlines, absence of soil materials necessary for traditional closure methods, state and local regulatory uncertainty, and heightened public scrutiny. Additionally, many of these facilities are impoundments containing saturated waste, which introduces technical challenges that compound the difficulties of meeting the project objectives. This paper examines a final closure project where an alternative closure method was successfully deployed and satisfied all of the criteria described above; namely regulatory requirements, community approval, geotechnical instability, project schedule, and soil conservation. The alternative closure method presented utilizes a unique tufted geosynthetic material, a structured geomembrane and a specified infill material that is laid within the tufts of the geosynthetic material.
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